How Clever Marketing Heads are Dragging Their Companies Into the Future

Love this post on growing marketing tech budgets. Innovative companies and CMO executive search firms will need to be on the lookout for the rare individuals capable of handling new technology and leading the innovations charge with careful change management.

According to Gartner, CMOs will be spending more money on IT than CIOs by the year 2017. As companies focus on using new technologies to deliver user-centric solutions, marketing leaders are being entrusted to lead tech projects more than ever before.

The Right Leader for Your CMO Executive Search

It’s also true that many marketing budgets are growing faster than IT budgets. The digital surge in 2010 began to blur the lines between the CMO and CIO, and that flux continues. Social media, mobile, digital marketing staffing, analytics, and cloud computing have tightly aligned marketing with technology. On average, marketing departments already buy nearly one-third of named marketing-related technologies, leading CMOs to influence almost half of all purchases.

With a greater alignment of marketing and technology, CMOs now must think about fostering digital innovation within their companies. Savvy marketing leaders know how to connect with customers, but leading tech-driven innovation projects require a much different approach than running a traditional campaign.

Taking Lessons from Agile Tech Giants

Agile thinking–quickly validating a product thought through testing and learning–is winning the day in Silicon Valley in product development, advertising, and client acquisition.

Modern firms can’t manage to spend months–or years–developing a brand new product before placing it in front of consumers. Whether a site, app, or campaign that is digital, the CMO needs to get a trim version live as soon as possible and then quickly iterate based on user feedback to be able to be successful.

Once in the control of real customers, a robust user feedback cycle can validate ideas and identify great opportunities to pivot to maximize effectiveness. While the merchandise manager or director of digital can state what must be trimmed from the initial product in order to establish quickly, the CMO can help identify that need and push for a skimpy, iterative strategy. This collaboration can help businesses ship an impactful, user-centric merchandise in months, rather than years.